Hyperuniform Structures Formed by Shearing Colloidal Suspensions

In periodically sheared suspensions there is a dynamical phase transition, characterized by a critical strain amplitude γc, between an absorbing state where particle trajectories are reversible and an active state where trajectories are chaotic and diffusive. Repulsive nonhydrodynamic interactions between "colliding"particles' surfaces have been proposed as a source of this broken time reversal symmetry. A simple toy model called random organization qualitatively reproduces the dynamical features of this transition. Random organization and other absorbing state models exhibit hyperuniformity, a strong suppression of density fluctuations on long length scales quantified by a structure factor S(q→0)∼qα with α0, at criticality. Here we show experimentally that the particles in periodically sheared suspensions organize into structures with anisotropic short-range order but isotropic, long-range hyperuniform order when oscillatory shear amplitudes approach γc.